Too clever by half, then not clever enough

Upon our arrival in Cleveland last Friday afternoon after a three-day drive from Boston, we hastily emptied the car before the start of the Sabbath.  Imagine my dismay to discover that the duffel bag containing all of my clothes was missing!  I had put my clothes for the trip in my backpack, so that I wouldn’t have to take out the duffel until our arrival, but that of course meant that I never noticed it was missing.

I was dumbfounded.  I was sure that I’d loaded all the bags into the car.  I could imagine only three possible explanations, all of which were unpleasant: (1) I idiotically failed to load my duffel into the car; (2) I removed the duffel from the trunk at some point during the trip while accessing another bag, failed to put it back, and drove away without it; (3) we left the van unlocked and untended at some point during the trip and someone snatched the duffel.

Needless to say, I went into the Sabbath feeling rather grumpy.  I ended up wearing the same clothes, which were decidedly not Sabbath-appropriate, until Sunday evening, at which point I managed to acquire some new clothes from Dillard’s as described in my last blog entry.

Upon my arrival at home last night (I can’t afford to miss work for the entire vacation, so I flew home alone and will fly back to Cleveland next week to spend the weekend and then drive home with the family), I found that the missing duffel was not in the house, which left only options (2) or (3).  Therefore, this morning, I spent over an hour methodically reconstructing our trip so that I could figure out everywhere we stopped and call all of the relevant facilities and local police departments to see if anyone had found our bag.  I ran out of time in the middle of this effort and left for work.

While on my way to work, my wife called my cell phone from Cleveland to inform me that there was a fourth possibility that I hadn’t even counted upon.  My duffel bag was in the van all along, in the storage compartment between the first and second row of seats where I “cleverly” put it before we left Boston, to save space in the trunk.

Looking on the bright side, I got some new clothes, which I needed, out of it.  On the other hand, boy, do I feel like an idiot. *sigh*